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This year Marc Miller (right) is joined in the #33 car by Daniel Burkett (left).

CJ Wilson Racing

The team's oil sponsor keeps making me think of Futurama...

CJ Wilson Racing

The Cayman's big rivals for this race, Rum Bum Racing's Porsche 911, Multimatic's Shelby GT350R-C, and a trio of the Boss Mustang 302Rs.

CJ Wilson Racing

OK, I might just have included this photo because I love the color of the grandstands in the background. Did you know Daytona International Speedway just had a $400 million refit? It puts most sports stadiums to shade.

Porsche revealed the Cayman GT4 Clubsport at the LA Auto Show in November. It's the grey and yellow car.

Jonathan Gitlin

When we last met CJ Wilson Racing, the team had just won the 2015 Street Tuner championship in the Continental Tires Sportscar Challenge. For 2016, this racing team led by the Major League Baseball star of the same name has stepped up to Grand Sport, the top class in the Continental series. And it's doing so with a brand-new race car—the Porsche Cayman GT4 Clubsport.

With the Cayman GT4, Porsche finally did something most of us have been waiting for; it built a track-focused Cayman. The company has always said that the 911 is the flagship, and until the GT4, it was fairly obvious that Weissach did not want to cannibalize sales of track-biased 911s by letting its mid-engined younger brother upstage things. But Porsche has a habit of making a stripped out version of models that have reached their end of life—The Cayman (and Boxster) are now part of the 718 family, and from here on out they will use turbocharged 4-cylinder engines. The naturally aspirated 6-cylinder Cayman GT4 is a prime example of the breed.

Those who've driven the road car have come away breathless and delighted, and if you want one be prepared to pay a big premium over msrp. A racing version showed up at November's LA Auto Show, complete with 911 GT3 front suspension and a PDK gearbox in place of the road car's conventional six speed manual. Even though the team is in its early days with the new car, Wilson seemed impressed. "It's amazing how capable this car was out of the box," he told Ars. "We slapped Continental tires on it, put it at the right ride height, changed some springs around and went out and whacked it on the track. We put up some good times. We have have two really good drivers but Porsche did everything they needed to do."

Wilson had a choice between a few different machines to move into the faster of the two CTSC classes. The Chevrolet Camaro was getting a bit long in the tooth (a new race version is in the works but not ready yet), and other teams were already running the (amazing-sounding) Ford Shelby GT350R-C. "There was the BMW M4 but that would be a build it yourself, 2000 man-hours project. We were excited that Porsche was going to develop the car themselves and hand it over to us fully built so all we had to do was change the ride height and put in the right fuel cell for the series," he said.

Wilson isn't one of the team's drivers—that would be pretty difficult given his full-time job with the Anaheim Angels. But he knows what he's doing with fast cars (he owns a McLaren P1 for example) and drove the Cayman at the preseason test, so we asked him what the GT4 was like to drive and how it compared to the Miata that won last year's championship?

"I feel like they really nailed it," he said. "It's a car that's a little bit tricky at the extreme limit, at that 99/100ths, you have to drive it a certain way to get the lap time out of it."

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According to Wilson, the Porsche wasn't much heavier (Porsche quotes 2,866 lbs/1,300kg, the Miata was 2,335 lbs/1,060kg) but had significantly more power. "You're almost never going to overpower the tires [in the Miata]. If you look at the overall contact patch, we had 245s in the back, and now we have 275s. But we have 60 percent more horsepower," he continued.

The biggest difference between the cars is that the Cayman was designed to run on much bigger (20" vs 18") wheels and tires than what was allowed in CTSC. Going down to an 18-inch wheel means there's a bigger gap between the tire and the car's wheel arches. "We have extra wheel gap, so there's extra airflow issues. But the whole system—the synthesis of the parts, is what Porsche does so well," Wilson said. "What makes them good is they have a tactile confidence at the limit that you can exploit. You know exactly where the ABS intervention is, where it's understeering or oversteering, and you know right before it happens."

Since the race has yet to air—you can catch it on Fox Sports 1 on February 13 or on YouTube shortly afterwards—we won't spoil the result, but the CJ Wilson car topped the timesheets during practice and qualified at the sharp end of the grid. For now, Wilson seems happy competing in CTSC, but he would like to grow the operation beyond a single series; possibly karting and maybe even open-wheel. "I want to go to Le Mans. it's the ultimate crucible for our sport. but if something happened and we were to acquire an open-wheel side of things it would be great if we were going up against teams like Carlin or Andretti even in the lower rungs of the ladder." he admits. "It's fun to be at the point where you have a little momentum, but it's easy to get ahead of yourself."